A typical imaging system or “imager” can capture a series of image frames at a specified frame rate. Unfortunately, the temporal bandwidth of an imager is limited by the frame rate of the captured image frames. If an event occurs that is bright in intensity but that is shorter than the frame rate, information identifying when the event occurred can be lost due to the poor temporal resolution of the imager. The bright intensity of the event can also limit the ability of the imager to discern spatial information in a scene. Various bright events that could affect an imager include glint from reflective objects, muzzle flashes from weapons, or rocket propelled grenade launches.
One conventional approach to solving this problem includes the use of analog peak and derivative filtering. However, this approach typically consumes a large amount of power and does not work well with advanced digital imaging systems, such as those that use complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) pixels. Another conventional approach is to increase the overall frame rate of an imager and post-process image frames to locate events, but this approach lowers the sensitivity of the imager and drastically increases the amount of power consumed by the overall system.